Global Outreach–global citizen

The Mainz GO projects as Internationalisation@home

What are the GO projects?

The Global Outreach projects run by the Scotland HUB at the University of Mainz combine low-threshold and short-term mobility trips for our partner’ students from Scotland and Ireland with school projects in the Rhineland-Palatinate. It is important here to focus on current and socially relevant topics like sustainability, migration and climate protection. Together with our partner universities, these topics are dealt with in an academic and practical way using a hybrid format.

Students from the partner universities and from Mainz are initially organised into intercultural learning tandems and spend a week together attending interdisciplinary lectures covering the project’s respective main topic, in 2024 for instance this was Mankind and the Anthropocene. After this theoretical introduction, the learning tandems then move on to selected schools in the Rhineland-Palatinate. There they join with the local pupils in realising individual (small) projects relating to the respective topic.

This project format merges theory and practice to enable cooperative learning in intercultural encounters involving pupils and student teachers from Scotland, Ireland and the University of Mainz. These projects are subsequently presented to a wider audience at the University of Mainz Scotland Festival, the ‘Scot-t Fest’.

[...] I had the pleasure of meeting a diverse group of people from various backgrounds – the intercultural exchange was particularly rewarding! It was such a wonderful way to foster appreciation for global perspectives.

Laura Kolontaja

What value do the GO projects add to the University of Mainz?

The intercultural encounters involving student teachers and pupils in the Rhineland-Palatinate foster dialogue regarding socially relevant topics from an international perspective. The GO projects therefore present the University of Mainz as having a cosmopolitan, multilingual and intercultural campus.

GO Mensch is a fantastic opportunity to learn more about the German language, culture and also the environment. We had the opportunity to explore different towns and villages near Mainz and had very enlightening conversations with the teachers at the language course. The talks and excursions throughout the project were really interesting and provided various different points of view on the topic of climate change and the Anthropocene. I would definitely recommend this experience to others.

Adele McHugh

Financial sustainability and regional networking

The short-term nature of each project means that the university’s financial costs are relatively low, which helps to make internationalisation at the University of Mainz financially sustainable. This enables a constant number of incoming students to be maintained with minimal resources and the University of Mainz also achieves diverse international networking and effective public relations within the Rhineland-Palatinate. Linking internationalisation at a higher education level with impact at a local school level enables the University of Mainz to become a hub of international collaboration and promotes an awareness of intercultural aspects and diversity among all participants.

Being part of this project has brought a lot of new experiences and enabled me to learn new things that I wasn’t knowledgeable about. I have learnt a lot about the Anthropocene and climate change, and hopefully I can start implementing this knowledge in my daily life to make changes! [. . .] It was one of the best experiences.

Siploma Diya

Further information and contact

Project homepage

Contact

PD D Sigrid Rieuwerts
Scotland HUB, Department of English and Linguistics,
University of Mainz
get-across-borders@uni-mainz.de
Tel.: +49 (0)6131 3922763